Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
yet who think that they did get the real medicine, so that the power of suggestion cannot be seen as responsible for the alleged benefit.
Anything approved by the FDA has met this standard; most stuff sold in “New Age” or “health food” stores has not been so carefully studied. When such things have been analyzed, they have usually turned out to have either marginal benefits or none at all. (The stores will take your money all the same.) If you listen closely to the words promoting some of these “medicines,” they must carefully avoid the terminology of medicine and pharmacology and must instead use phrases like “supports thyroid health” or “promotes healthy bladder function.” These phrases are not true medicinal claims, and so they are not subject to FDA regulations. Nonetheless, the great majority of these products that have been scientifically analyzed turn out to be worthless and a waste of money, and every once in a while, they prove to be harmful or even deadly.
Similarly, the evidence for UFOs or alien abductions or Sasquatch sightings is largely anecdotal. One person, usually alone, is a witness to these extraordinary events and is convinced they are real. However, studies have shown again and again how easily people can hallucinate or be deceived by common natural phenomena into seeing something that really isn’t there. A handful of eyewitnesses means nothing in science when the claims are unusual; much more concrete evidence is needed.
4. Arguments from Authority and Credential Mongering
Many people try to win arguments by quoting some authority on the subject in an attempt to intimidate and silence their opponents. Sometimes they are accurately quoting people who really are expert in a subject, but more often than not, the quotation is out of context and does not support their point at all, or the authority is really not that authoritative. This is the usual problem with creationist quotes from authority: when you go back and look at the source, the quote is out of context and means the opposite of what they claim, or the source itself is outdated or not very credible. As Carl Sagan puts it, there are no true authorities; there are people with expertise in certain areas, but nobody is an authority in more than a narrow range of human knowledge.
One of the principal symbols of authority in scholarship and science is the PhD degree. But you don’t need a PhD to do good science, and not all people who have science PhDs are good scientists. As those of us who have gone through the ordeal know, a PhD only proves that you can survive a grueling test of endurance in doing research and writing a dissertation on a very narrow topic. It doesn’t prove that you are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to render an opinion than anyone else. Because earning a PhD requires enormous focus on one specific area, many people with that degree have actually lost a lot of their scholarly breadth and knowledge of other fields in the process of focusing on their thesis.
In particular, it is common for people making extraordinary claims (like creationism or alien abductions or psychic powers) to wear a PhD, if they have one, like a badge, advertise it prominently on their book covers, and feature it in their biographies. They know that it will impress and awe the listener or reader into thinking they are smarter than anyone else or more qualified to pronounce on a topic. Nonsense! Unless the claimant has earned a PhD and done research in the subject being discussed, the degree is entirely irrelevant to the controversy.
For example, many of the critics of the evidence for global climate change are physicists or other scientists with no actual research in climate science. Their degree may make them an expert in physics, but climate science is a completely different field with a different data set and different kind of training. They are presumptuous and arrogant to think that their physics degree makes them an expert in this very different field. Even worse are meteorologists who criticize climate science. Since I teach both subjects at the college level, I can tell you that their claims are ridiculous. Meteorology deals with the day-to-day weather, but climate science deals with climate, the long-term average of weather, based on ice cores, tree rings, deep-sea sediments, and other geological phenomena. A meteorologist has no qualification to critique climate data, so when you hear them spouting off about climate change in the news, they come off as rank amateurs. Unfortunately, the average person, who doesn’t know that climate is not the same as weather, is fooled nonetheless.
The “scientific” leaders of the creationist movement included a man with a doctorate in hydraulic engineering and another who was a biochemist but trained over seventy years ago. Neither had any training in fossils or in geology or any other field beyond their specializations, but they wrote endless false information about paleontology or geology or thermodynamics. Their doctoral degrees were completely irrelevant to those fields. Yet they always flaunted their PhDs to awe the masses and tried to intimidate their opponents. In all of these cases, a degree in an unrelated field does not make you an expert in any other field. My PhD and published research have made me expert in many areas of geology, paleontology, and climate science, but they don’t qualify me to write a symphony or fix a car.
Similarly, there are many fringe ideas in lots of fields, and the more “way out there” they are, the more likely the author has put “PhD” on the cover. By contrast, legitimate scientists do not put their degree on their book cover and seldom list their credentials on a scientific article either. If you doubt this, just look at the science shelves in your local bookstore. The quality of the research must stand by itself, not be propped up by an appeal to authority based on your level of education. To most scientists, credential mongering is a red-flag warning. If the author flaunts a PhD on the cover, beware of the stuff inside!
5. Bold Statements and Scientific-Sounding Language Do Not Make It Science
People who want to promote their radical ideas are prone to exaggeration and famous for making amazing pronouncements such as “a milestone in human history” or “the greatest discovery since Copernicus” or “a revolution in human thinking.” Our baloney-detection alarms should go off automatically when we hear politicians or actors hyping policies or movies that turn out to be much less than claimed. The alarms should also scream when we hear people making claims about human knowledge or science that seem overblown.
Another strategy for making a wild idea acceptable to the mainstream is to cloak it in the language of science. This cashes in on the goodwill and credibility that science has in our culture and attempts to make such outrageous ideas more believable. For example, when the creationists realized that they could not pass off their religious beliefs in public school classrooms as science, they began calling themselves “creation-scientists” and eliminating overt references to God in their public school textbooks (but the religious motivation and source of the ideas is still transparently obvious). Several religions (including Christian Science and Scientology) appropriate the aura of scientific authority by using the word in their name, even though the religions are not falsifiable and do not fit the criteria of science as discussed here.
Similarly, the snake oils and nostrums peddled by telemarketers and by New Age alternative-medicine advocates are often described in what appears to be scientific lingo, but when you examine it closely, the makers of the products do not actually follow scientific protocols or the scientific method. We all know examples of television commercials that show an actor in a white lab coat, often with a stethoscope around his or her neck, saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” and then promoting a product. The “doctor” has no medical training, but just the appearance of scientific and medical authority is sufficient to sway people to buy the product.
6. Special Pleading, Moving the Goalposts, and Ad Hoc Hypotheses
In science, when an observation comes up that appears to falsify your hypothesis, it is a good idea to examine the observation closely or to run the experiment again to be sure that it is real. But if the contradictory data are sound, then the original hypothesis is falsified, dead, kaput. It is time to throw it out and come up with a new, possibly better, hypothesis.
In the case of many nonscientific belief systems, from religions to mysticism to Marxism, it does not work this way. Belief systems often have a profound emotional and mystical attachment for people who hold these beliefs in spite of contradictory observations and refuse to let rationality or the facts shake them. As Tertullian put it, “I believe because it is incredible.”12